Should I Set Up a Patrron for My Art Page
Making fine art is hard enough, permit alone trying to brand living off information technology. A recent survey of 2,000 artists by the Kickstarter-backed publication Creative Independent revealed that 29 percent of respondents relied on money from a family unit inheritance to support themselves. The same survey showed that fifty-fifty those artists who had gallery representation didn't make much of an income from the gallery. As many as 42 per centum relied on a twenty-four hour period job to support themselves.
This is where services like Patreon come in. Founded in 2013, Patreon is an online platform designed to assist creators get paid for making art. Currently used by about 100,000 creators, Patreon operates on a similar concept to Kickstarter—but instead of supporting a specific project by an artist, y'all straight back up the creative person. Ideally, the service functions similarly to the free room and board offered by purple patrons of centuries by, paying for the necessities of life so that artists are free to focus on their fine art.
Here's how information technology works if you're an creative person. Yous set a free Patreon business relationship, creating a folio that details who you are, what you do, and explains why people should finance your fine art, including unlike levels of support. Let's say you offer access to exclusive artworks for $ane a calendar month. You share this page with your many thousands of fans on social media. Almost a hundred of them decide to subscribe. Now your banking concern account is $100 heavier each month (minus a 5% Patreon fee and boosted payment processing fees deducted past the service).
At to the lowest degree, this is the premise of Patreon. What if yous have just 1500 Instagram followers, though, not 150,000? The possibility of "predictable income" and "a meaningful revenue stream" Patreon offers on its homepage is appealing. But is in that location any value in Patreon for creators who aren't already kind of famous?
A quick browse through Patreon reveals a selection of the site'southward "Top 20" creators, grouped into mostly artistic categories like Writing, Comics, and Photography. I had a tough fourth dimension coming across brand new or emerging creators on the site, because Patreon doesn't brand information technology easy to detect them. "We are non solving the 'you don't accept any fans, to having fans' problem—we're solving how you go from fans to patrons, and building that sustainable income," Patreon's Head of Marketing, Carla Borsoi, told me in a phone telephone call. Patreon wasn't able to share how many patrons a user typically has, but I tallied up the numbers on a few of the more than arts-oriented Top 20 categories (Video & Film, Comics, Crafts & DIY, Drawing & Painting, and Photography) and found that the average creator from these categories had near two,000 patrons. These creators are raking in an average minimum of $2000/calendar month, and maybe much more if they have a lot of patrons subscribed to higher payment tiers.
I reached out to several of these Superlative 20 people to ask them about their experience with Patreon—why they decided to offset using the platform, whether or non they would recommend it to other artists, how they went about finding patrons.
Many of these creators told me that Patreon had improved their financial stability. Alice Oseman, who is currently making $3,849 monthly from 954 patrons, calls Patreon her "most regular and reliable source of income." The 23-year-old writer and creative person initially turned to Patreon in late 2016 as a identify to promote her self-published web comic Heartstopper. "As I create and post the web comic entirely for free, it was a great manner for people to support the comic financially so that I could dedicate more fourth dimension to it and post updates more regularly," she told me in an email. Oseman's patrons receive early on updates to the comic and exclusive artworks which aren't available to non-paying readers.
Oseman stressed that, as a self-employed creator, Patreon "makes me feel much more secure in my career;" she compared the reliability of her Patreon income to the sense of security a regular business organization employee would experience. Rachel J. Pierce, an illustrator and comics artist, described a similar experience with Patreon, telling me, "Patreon has made it possible for me to leave my function-time task and piece of work on freelance fine art total time." Pierce, who has been on the platform since 2015, has 612 patrons. "In add-on to creating more content for the folio, this besides allows me to pursue personal projects that I wouldn't accept had time for otherwise," she adds. Pierce told me that most of her patrons institute her through other websites. She promotes her Patreon to more than 150,000 engaged followers on her Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr. On Instagram, Pierce's posts routinely receive hundreds of comments from fans who are clearly shut followers of her comics. Information technology makes sense that these are people who might be willing to commit a small amount of money each month to help Pierce cover her "hire, auto insurance, medical bills, student loans," as she explains on her Patreon.
Sam Hurd, a self-employed photographer who's been using Patreon since May 2017, frames patronage less as a means for his fans to help him out, and more as a risk for them to bring together an sectional customs of photography enthusiasts. Hurd currently has 954 patrons, who receive access not only to behind-the-scenes looks at his photograph procedure, only are too able to join in group photograph critiques and pose technical questions to Hurd. "I've been full-time self-employed for half dozen years and v of those were spent with irrational fears about where my next paycheck was going to come from," Hurd told me. "Now that's not nearly as much of a business organisation."
The Washington, DC photographer says that he decided to join Patreon "out of frustration" after the blog posts he was sharing on his personal website kept getting picked up by larger platforms. The bigger sites would sometimes credit him, he says, "but they would link back to me in ways that didn't help for my SEO, and they'd reap all the monetary benefits from ads and growing their readership." Seeing that people were interested in what he had to say most photography, Hurd moved over to Patreon. Although Hurd has close to 200,000 followers combined on Facebook and Instagram, he says it'southward nevertheless "been a very long and uphill battle converting people to Patreon. A lot of it is just educating people on what Patreon even is."
Patreon'south Carla Borsoi echoed the sentiment that educating one's existing followers on Patreon is key to success on the platform. "For up-and-coming creators, what we notice is that they tin sometimes kickoff a Patreon and information technology can be really difficult to build a Patreon and build your business at the same time," she said. "The product itself is really designed to build that membership business." She added that the company hopes creators sympathize this earlier coming to Patreon. While the site offers diverse guides on how to go set up, Borsoi acknowledges that Patreon works best for those creators who already have an audience, rather than those who are looking to build one.
Grayson James is a Toronto-based artist, author, and recent graduate who started using Patreon in Apr. And then far he has merely six patrons. Simply when I asked if he planned to stick with Patreon in the future, his response was "Hell yes." Hoping to slowly grow his current modest following, James sees Patreon equally a long game. Compared to the gallery world, he says, "it seems like a way, style, way, ameliorate economic model for artists to be post-obit."
"The commercial gallery organization is wildly precarious for working artists," James told me via email. "Y'all have one, perchance two shows a twelvemonth, and if you don't sell your super expensive works yous accept no money. In improver to that, I have zero interest in building a practice that is centered on making luxury items for the wealthy. I would style rather sell 100 books for $15 to my friends and peers than I would one $1500 framed print to a collector, who I can simply assume has washed cipher to earn their wealth, or my respect."
James became interested in Patreon through podcasts, he says, and Brad Troemel'southward Instagram. The New York-based artist and writer, who has about 65,000 Instagram followers, does a monthly artwork giveaway for his patrons and also offers them in-person studio visits and exclusive access to paywalled content. With 694 patrons, starting at $5 and upward, he's making at minimum $3470 monthly from Patreon.
Troemel's method of offer physical rewards to patrons resonated with James; his $xv patrons receive monthly publications that he makes by paw. For just $5/month, patrons receive a 18x24" poster, a print, and a sticker. James also sells work through Successful Press, the small printing that he runs; the timeline enforced by Patreon use motivates him to keep producing new work monthly. At rates like these, James's Patreon seems more almost hosting his piece of work and sharing it with others than really turning a turn a profit. But, he tells me, "The actual upkeep required to run the Patreon is negligible."
Freelance journalist Jake Hanrahan voiced a similar perspective on Patreon. The British reporter, who focuses on disharmonize reporting, started using the platform to promote his podcast Popular Forepart. Afterwards starting his career at Vice News, Hanrahan has worked with ProPublica, The Guardian, and the BBC; an established reporter, he turned to Patreon not to raise coin to support himself but in the hopes of breaking even on the podcast. A personal side project past Hanrahan, Popular Front aims to cover nether-reported and overlooked stories. "I saw that there was a fleck of a gap in news reporting and conflict reporting, where the really niche details are not discussed enough," Hanrahan says. He hopes that Popular Front end can offer an uncensored, detailed discussion of important news that might not make it to the front page of major publications. "I don't remember you can fully understand a situation without understanding the small details," Hanrahan told me. "The world is not made up of hands digestible situations, information technology is made up of niche, intricate details, which I call back need talking almost. Nuance is important as well."
Since its commencement April episode, which focused on far-right militants in the Syrian civil war, Pop Front has attracted 136 patrons, and is currently making $1,266 a month. Hanrahan hopes to eventually shoot documentaries if Pop Forepart gets enough support. "I guess if it got to the point where I was making enough money to live off of, Popular Front would become my total-time job," Hanrahan says.
Patreon isn't the only online subscription-based pick available to artists looking to experiment with crowdfunding their work. The recently re-launched Drip, a platform purchased by Kickstarter in 2016, has a like premise. Originally launched in 2012, Drip initially focused on helping musicians discover financial support. "In that location remain big groups of artists and creators who don't see subscriptions every bit plumbing equipment their artistic practices," Kickstarter's Perry Chen wrote in a 2017 weblog mail most the brand's relaunch of Drip, which saw the platform marketed to a wider range of creators. "Our goal with the new Drip is to change that." Drip didn't respond to a request for comment, but I reached out to Brooklyn-based creative person Nic Annette Miller to ask well-nigh her experience on the platform.
Miller says she was invited to effort Drip when it relaunched in Nov 2017. She hadn't heard of Patreon at the time. "Oversupply-sourcing hasn't been a focus of mine, and is honestly out of my condolement zone. But with Drip, I like how the focus is more on supporting an artist in their various multi-level process of developing something from seemingly nothing." Miller currently has 38 Drip subscribers and makes $244/month from the platform. For $3/month, subscribers are able to follow along with Miller's creative procedure as she works on an installation project inspired by beehives. Her model is similar to James' approach, with subscribers post-obit along for updates on ongoing work equally well as special rewards. For $viii/month, Miller'due south subscribers will receive a limited edition 11x14" print when her project is complete. "With Drip, I can put the monthly support straight towards what I'm building," says Miller. "And on a personal level, information technology's incredibly encouraging to have people who believe in what I'thou making and desire to literally see information technology the whole way through." She says that she uses her social media channels equally well equally her newsletter to promote her Drip, adding that "the majority of my subscribers are the ones who have been following my online meanderings for years."
Clocking in at around 8,200 followers combined on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, Miller'due south online following certainly isn't huge. But with just 38 of those people engaged enough to sign up for her Drip, Miller has been able to generate a not insignificant amount of extra income. She says she would recommend Baste to other artists, noting that her behind-the-scenes arroyo is just one case of the various means the platform enables creators to share their work. Like other artists I spoke with, Miller cites a paying audience as a helpful source of motivation, pointing out that sharing your creative procedure with others can be a useful mode to learn from mistakes and abound as an artist. "On ane paw information technology's incredibly vulnerable to share a lot," she says. "But on the other, information technology'due south all part of the experience and should be more widely known. Looking back and seeing all these obstacles is really prissy to remind myself what it takes to create."
A lot of the creators I spoke with, both the well-established and the beginners, stressed the emotional support that Patreon can provide as much—or sometimes more than—than the potential financial security it offers. "Even if there are just one or two people out there who are subscribed to your Patreon page, that support can provide a little extra income and assistance create a sense of loyalty with some of your biggest fans," Athens, Georgia-based illustrator Katy Lipscomb told me. "Even if the budgetary reciprocation is relatively small, just seeing that people genuinely believe in what you lot're doing can hateful and so much." The recently-graduated fine art pupil joined Patreon in 2015. "Patreon really tin can have an enormous impact on your financial security as a creator," she says, adding that she used to "heavily rely" on Patreon as part of her monthly salary. Lipscomb took a hiatus from the platform in 2016 to focus on completing her BFA at the University of Georgia. She says she uses social media to discover patrons; she has an audience of close to 300,000 fans on Instagram and Facebook, and 61 patrons. Lipscomb acknowledged that building a social following is often an important element of a successful Patreon. "Patreon can be an incredible platform for creators, only it is entirely what you lot make of information technology."
While information technology's clear that some artists notice a lot of value in Patreon, especially every bit a source of community and peer support, some creators express frustration with the platform. Writer and lensman Brent Knepper recently shared his experience with Patreon in an article on The Outline, writing that, "When I first signed upwardly, I idea I was the perfect match for Patreon's model. But now I'm realizing that as a struggling photographer without a massive social media following, I'chiliad probably not Patreon's Target Creator." Knepper argues that the vast majority of Patreon creators are making only a negligible amount. Since setting up a Patreon account doesn't cost anything, yous could besides contend that creators accept nothing to lose from trying it out. On the other paw, setting up an business relationship does take time, and when you lot're a freelancer, time is money that yous tin can't always beget to spare.
Ultimately, what I learned from speaking with these creators is that Patreon is a highly useful tool for some people and a big letdown for others, and those two groups of people aren't always who you'd wait. Some artists with very small followings on the platform are satisfied with the moral support, sense of structure in their practise, and modest amount of cash that Patreon facilitates. Others who await to the site as a moneymaker may come away feeling bellyaching when patronage doesn't result in enough money to make the budget of Patreon worthwhile.
While some successful users, like Alice Oseman and Rachel J. Pierce, are making what could be a living wage through Patreon, it does seem likely that they are in the minority, every bit Knepper suggests. So again, only because someone has but a few patrons doesn't necessarily hateful they aren't making any money. "It's really hard to talk about what's the optimal number of patrons to have, because it'south and then dependent on the creator and what they're offering as their membership tiers and benefits," Carla Borsoi told me. "For example, y'all might see someone that only has 20 patrons on the platform and yous won't see how much they're making… But they might have 20 patrons who are all contributing l dollars or 100 dollars each month. That membership can exist a very strong financial signal to the creator. Whereas you might take someone who is more support-based as a creator, and they might take 500 patrons who are but giving them one to iii dollars."
When I asked Grayson James if he'd tried whatsoever other like crowdfunding methods of financing his piece of work, he said he hadn't, merely he also pointed out that his Patreon is "an archaic model," in that "it's more or less a paper subscription." The idea of patronage is also, of course, an archaic ane. It used to be that the king, or the authorities, or some duke, would pay for artists to live and work, and talented painters wouldn't have to also concur downwardly jobs every bit baristas.
Today, information technology's becoming common for corporations to support artists in this style—Red Balderdash and Adobe both have well-established creative residency programs, for case. Artist residencies, corporate or otherwise, typically offer the opportunity to create piece of work in a new setting while your expenses are paid for; while they can be exciting chances to broaden your practice with a modify of scenery, residencies obviously aren't long-term options for artists looking to sustain themselves. For so many artists, a solar day task is a must if they want to pay the hire and take money left over for groceries, let lone the often expensive art supplies and studio space needed to create their work.
Information technology makes sense that even artists without big online followings would look to Patreon for a chance to earn a trivial extra money—and it seems that, for some, the platform does help deliver at least a pocket-size heave of financial support, like an ongoing online-based residency that comes alive a live audience. "Information technology's such an piece of cake and pleasant way to work through my ideas and make some actress money that information technology seems crazy to me that more than people aren't using it," Grayson James told me. Then over again, a lot of people may exist hesitant to crowdfund an income via Patreon because it feels weird to ask for payment without offer concrete work in return. Jake Hanrahan, for one, voiced this business organisation. "I thought nearly making a Patreon like, 'Hey, back up my work, blah blah blah.' But it doesn't feel right. I want to create something offset, and then if people like it they can support it. Not the other way round."
However, talking to successful Patreon users showed me that these aren't people who ask for support without giving dorsum, but instead actively practice a lot of work for their patrons (sharing works in progress, studio photos, professional advice, and so on). And a lot of this piece of work is labor that many artists not on Patreon are actually already doing, for free, on social media. Especially for emerging artists, maintaining an active and curated social media presence is often an unavoidable aspect of a creative career. It might feel weird, but if you're already doing this work for free, why not at least try to become paid for it?
More on the business of artistic work:
How My 24-hour interval Job Inspires My Creative Piece of work
The Link Between Creatives and Underemployment
The Challenges of Overcoming Artistic Imposter Syndrome
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Source: https://www.format.com/magazine/features/art/artists-making-living-patreon
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